Highlights
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Fascination for biology has a positive impact on content learning.•
Students with higher fascination show an advance in long-term knowledge gain.•
Further research is needed to prevent performance gaps between high and low fascinated students.
Abstract
One way of engaging the public in major environmental issues, such as biodiversity loss, is citizen science. Up to now, the potential of implementing citizen science into formal learning environments has remained largely unconsidered. We engaged 276 German 10th graders in a collaborative citizen science project on DNA barcoding as part of a biodiversity education module. Our research focused on monitoring the relation between fascination for biology and students’ cognitive performance. Following a pre-post-retention design, we measured content knowledge and fascination one week before, one week after, and six weeks after participation in the project. Our findings indicate fascination to be a variable positively related to science learning: in relation to their pre-knowledge scores, all students showed short-term knowledge gain. In the long-term, however, students with high fascination scores retained more knowledge than students with intermediate or low fascination scores.
